Re: EPUB 3.1 title and subtitle of a work, multiple roles of creators and contributors

Audrian Luc:
> Hi,
> 
> EPUB 3.1 has deprecated the refines attribute.
> (see http://www.idpf.org/epub/31/spec/epub-changes.html#sec-pkg-refines)
> 

Yes, that is the problem ;-)

> To provide more complex metadata, you could use the link element to a richer
> document serialized in several available schemas, like JSON or ONIX.
 (see
> http://www.idpf.org/epub/31/spec/epub-packages.html#sec-link-elem). 
> Luc
> 

This I have seen, but yet another format in an EPUB? - often it is already too 
much for most authors already to provide substantial metadata in the EPUB 2 or 
3.0 way ;-)
I think, this metadata area was too complex right from the start and pretty 
confusing.
If one uses element from the Dublin Core namespace, surely Dublin Core defines 
the meaning of the elements, not EPUB. 
Therefore EPUB must not define attributes with no (own) namespace for them to 
redefine the meaning.
The methods in 2 are different from 3.0, different now again for 3.1.
This is completely borked now in EPUB.
Would have been a better approach to use own elements (with subelements to 
refine the meaning, if required).

And typically it is a problem for the audience, that many EPUB viewers do not 
expose much of this metadata anyway - but this is not really a surprise, if it 
has to be noted in every version in a different way.

But if one can link to an XHTML+RDFa content document with this link element, 
this might solve most problems.
But confusing as well EPUB 3.1 link element mentions:
'Linked resources are not Publication Resources and must not be listed in the 
manifest.'.
Why not, if it is XHTML+RDFa?
One could provide a W3C note with a larger amount of examples how to mark up 
typical works with rich metadata in this way.
This format choice does not require another interface by EPUB readers to make 
this information accessible for readers and still it can be extracted with an 
RDFa parser automatically.
Currently I anyway duplicate all this information into an XHTML document for 
the audience due to the problem, that most viewers provide no complete access 
to this information.
Most authors do not provide anyway much metadata, because EPUB viewers do not 
expose much of it, therefore this is often considered to be irrelevant.
If authors can't access it in a viewer, they typically do not care about it.


However, still then there is the complication, that EPUB 3.1 still requires 
some metadata, this would be a redundant duplication of information, if one 
provides this information anyway in more detail with an XHTML+RDFa content 
document.

Olaf

Received on Monday, 3 April 2017 09:51:27 UTC